And the problem here is the same, the lack of explanation not the process.

The only ways around this are to register a new account (using a new email address, or you’ll get an error) every time you use the site, or to remember to log in immediately when visiting the site–even though it has cookies that make it seem like this is unnecessary.

The site drives me up the wall, and I’ve emailed them to explain the problem, but no response yet…

The one thing that did piss me off big time about Amazon (on the .co.uk at least, and I think they’ve fixed it recently), was their login form. It had the email address field, then radio buttons for “I’m new”, or “I’m a returning customer, and my password is: (text input field)”.

This is great and intuitive, but if you land on this page suddenly when you attempt to access order information or something on the high security level, your eye recognises a login form with two text input boxes and a login button. Straight away you type a password into the relevant field and hit enter on the keyboard, but wait! The radio button is still in the default position of “I’m new”.

They recognised the problem, but rather than solving the issue properly, they handled the symptom with a special error message: “You said you’re new but you entered a password. Please go back and sort it out.”

As I say, I think they’ve resolved this now, but this was a glaring error for several years.

could it be as simple as changing the label for the functionality presented: what if instead of “sign in”, they asked the user to “verify your identity”

IIRC, Yahoo does this, usually when you’re switching from viewing (like news, personalized homepage, etc.) to potentially acting (email, Flickr, groups(?)). I find their explanation very concise and helpful.

I agree with you that Amazon would benefit from some extra customer guidance / extra information about the actions the user has to take and maybe just as important: the reason why. It will not only improve the usability for the user, but it also shows that Amazon handles your private information with care (and that will improve the user experience even more)!

Tom, you may need to keep trying until you find the right person– I also had dual accounts due to a password muddle, but I got Amazon to merge them. Granted, this was a while back and their policies may have since changed, but it may just be a matter of calling back until you get someone clueful.

Once I worked out what was going on, I can make sure to use one or the other, but I still sometimes forget.

Amazon will not merge these two accounts.

Partially, but that’s not the whole reason. I send a lot of gifts with Amazon, and it seems like they remember which credit card you use to send things to which address. They remember you used your credit card to send a book to your office, but if you try to send something to a different address, you have to enter the card again because you’re using it to send something to a new place. I guess this prevents someone from using your computer to buy something and send it to themselves?

As a minor nit, I think you may have meant to include an apostrophe in the context of “using the users credit card”?

It goes something like this: Open up LinkedIn. “It’s been a while since I’ve been here, let me check if there’s anyone new I know in my network.” Click My Contacts tab. Click Colleagues link. Click Find New button. “Hmm, I don’t recognize any of these people.” Click “I don’t know anyone here” link. Sign In page comes up. “WTF? That doesn’t even makes sense! Why did it let me view my contacts, see the list of potential connections, and then when I don’t know anyone, it asks me for my login information?!”

At least with Amazon.com there’s financial information to protect. What is LinkedIn trying to protect against, I wonder?